George Grant and the Pipeline Debate of 1956

In 1956, the Pile-Line Debate was a signal example of failure to legitimize power.  The Liberals openly announced that our resource were at the disposal of continental capitalism.  The use of closure expressed the Howe administration’s contempt for the “talking shop”. So much did they identify their branch-plant society with the Kingdom of Heaven that they did not pay sufficient attention to the farmers or the outlying regions.  Such regions existed for them as colonies of Montreal and Toronto.  The Conservative victory [under Diefenbaker in 1957] was accomplished by local businessmen who felt excluded from their own country by corporate capitalism.  Young men, ambitious for a life in politics, could not turn to the Liberal party, where the positions of power were well secured by the old pros.  The Liberal’s policy of satellite status to the United States, and their open attack on the British at the time of Suez, annoyed the residual loyalties of older Canadians.[1]

… It soon became evident that their [Conservative party] objections to the Pipe Line had only been constitutional.  They did not object to the control of public resources by private and foreign capitalists, but simply to the way Howe had pushed that control through Parliament.[2]

George Grant, Lament for a Nation (1965)

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[1] George Grant, Lament for a Nation.  The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism. (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1991), p. 11.

[2] Ibid., p. 19.

Kinder Morgan and the Trans Mountain Pipeline: the "bitumen battle"

History shows that British Columbia's provincial politics is dominated by ideological polarization and a tendency to extremes, with no middle ground ceded in what amounts to a zero sum game where there is a ‘winner take all’ attitude.   This was most clear in Gordon Campbell’s landslide victory in 2001 when the (neo) Liberals won all but 2 seats in the Victoria legislature, reducing the (left wing) New Democratic Party to unofficial opposition status. More recently, it took a Supreme Court of Canada decision to force Liberal Leader Christy Clark to relent in her obsessions and allow B.C. teachers a say in class size and composition, a move that took some 13 years or so to come to conclusion.

Today’s NDP, likewise, is plagued by its own drive for ideological and environmental promises of purity: no to Site C dam, yes to Site C dam; no to liquified natural gas, yes to LNG; no to tolls, maybe yes to smaller tolls. But the line across the sand over which John Horgan will not cross ‘as long as he is Premier’ is the twinning of an existing Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Pipeline, in operation since 1953 – and its possible implications for the health of the B.C. coastline should a bitumen spill occur, given an increase of one tanker a day in traffic.  Needless to say, the three Green Party members (who are propping up the razor-thin NDP minority government) are also dead set against this.

Normally minority governments can be creative ventures and a boon for democracy, which is about making compromises in a complicated world, but Premier Horgan’s posturing appears to pander to a form of environmental populism which resonates widely in a province as blessed as British Columbia.  I see no NDP effort to compromise with Andrew Wilkinson’s Liberals on the other side of the legislature regarding this issue, nor any efforts to work with their NDP cousins in Alberta under Rachel Notley, nor with the federal Liberals under Justin Trudeau.  Can they all be wrong?  Can the BC NDP be all right?  Should a so-called “constitutional crisis” tilt on a three-member Green alliance with the NDP in British Columbia?  I tend to disagree, but, maybe in another light, this opinion piece could be considered about fifty percent correct.

Off they go to China, again

It was quite fitting that six of nine Coquitlam School District 43 Trustees jetted off to China when they did.[1]  At the time of their departure President Xi Jinping was busy manipulating the constitution to put an end to term limits, so he would become president-for-life, which he is now: the eternal leader, above the rule of law.

Similarly, our school trustees continue to ignore consistent public opinion and the rule of Canadian law as expressed in British Columbia’s Community Charter, which among other things is intended to regulate “gifts” to our civic officials - and implicitly, as well, to our school trustees.  How do I know this?  Because our civic leaders and our trustees are decided in the very same community elections.

 

So our school trustees seem to consider themselves immune from any B.C. regulation while travelling with so-called “support” of the local Confucius Institute.  It is funded by China’s Communist party government (which has turned to the “soft” cover of Confucius to make itself appear more palatable) while the overseas students from China just happen to supply a mere 10% of SD43’s annual budget.

 

I suspect our school trustees are the only ones in British Columbia with such a deep conflict, because no other public school district in the province has fallen for a Confucius Institute.  The only other exception in Canada is the Confucius Institute at the K-12 School Board in Edmonton, and the one linked with the New Brunswick Department of Education.  Toronto rejected the alleged opportunity.

I am also told that adults are supposed to be role models for the young, but the tainted leadership at SD43 teaches us that we don’t have to pay attention to the inconvenient regulations or ethical concerns of B.C. democracy.  From my perspective, our local school trustees – and school board officials - are doing a deplorable job of instilling ethical virtue and conscientious respect for the rule of law among their charge.  But, as we all know, such style of leadership is a commonplace, nowadays.

 

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[1] See “Off to China they go, again” (Tri-City News, Feb. 23, 2018).

On Trump’s record of judicial appointments - a reminder

Stalin was possible because there were always judges to judge in accordance with his decree.[1]

Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth (1964)

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[1] Paul Ricoeur, “The Political Paradox” in History and Truth, tr. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press, 2007), p. 268.  The first edition of History and Truth appeared in 1955 and the second appeared in 1964.  Ricoeur’s “The Political Paradox” was first published in 1957, following the Hungarian Uprising of 1956.

The Genius of the Presidency

Thank God I am not a genius, otherwise I would be like Trump.

Thomas More on Trump

To mock the deformed or maimed is regarded as ugly and disfiguring, not to the individual mocked but to the one who mocks, because like an idiot he’s blaming the unfortunate victim for something he can do nothing about.[1]

 ~ Thomas More, Utopia (1516)

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[1] Thomas More, Utopia, tr. and ed. Dominic Baker-Smith (Toronto: Penguin, 2012), p. 95.

Why Canada's Parliament buildings are Gothic: The case for John Ruskin's "mountain brotherhood"

There is, I repeat, no degradation, no reproach in this, but all dignity and honourableness: and we should err grievously in refusing to recognize as an essential character of the existing architecture of the North, or to admit as a desirable character in that which it may yet be, this wildness of thought and roughness of work; this look of mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp; this magnificence of sturdy power, put forth only the more energetically because the fine finger-touch was chilled away by the frosty wind, and the eye dimmed by the moor-mist, or blinded by the hail; this out-speaking of the strong spirit of men who may not gather fruitage from the earth, nor bask in dreamy benignity of sunshine, but must break the rock for bread, and cleave the forest for fire, and show, even in what they did for their delight, some of the hard habits of the arm and heart that grew up on them as they swung the axe or pressed the plough.[1]

The above passage appears in John Ruskin’s famous essay “The Nature of Gothic” which was published in 1853 as part of his work, The Stones of Venice, written in an effort to cast out the ‘pagan’ and ‘plagiarizing’ effects of the last three hundred years of Greek, Roman, and Renaissance architecture in Europe.[2]  Gothic, on the other hand, was considered both scientific in terms of structure and sacred in terms of expression.[3]  From his vantage-point at Oxford, Ruskin as architectural theorist had a profound influence on Britain’s Gothic Revival, which was already underway following the need to rebuild Parliament, after fire consumed it in 1834.

Ottawa’s Parliament building are Gothic, partly because of the desire to follow the Westminster tradition, partly to avoid the neo-classical formations of Washington DC (hence heeding Ruskin, as well), but also as the above passage suggests: because of the “mountain brotherhood between the cathedral and the Alp.”  Ruskin stressed as primary the moral element of “savageness” in the Gothic imagination, an apt description of Canada’s untamed landscape and the hardships endured by its early pioneers.  The choice of location for Canada’s Parliament buildings, on the rocky promontory surveying the swirling Ottawa River, also indicates ‘savageness’, and it reflects Ruskin’s influence. Perhaps more importantly, as the above quotation suggests, Parliament’s aspiring Gothic features and high vaulted ceilings can be seen as a kind of complement to - or “mountain brotherhood” with - the Rockies to the West.

In other words, Canada’s Gothic Parliament buildings were considered a kind of national unity symbol, a statement of intent completed in 1866, a year before Confederation, well before any railroad could link east to west.

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[1] John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, ed. J.G. Links (Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press, 2003), p. 164.

[2] Ibid., pp, 244,245.

[3] Ibid., p. 161.